“Leave him he, man,” the kid said, taking hold of Hal’s shoulder, forcibly restraining him. “Let the cops take care of the stupid jerk.”
Seemingly on command, the cops showed up just then, arriving in a cacophony of sirens and a blinding flash of lights. Hal barely noticed. His whole being remained fixed on his wife’s crushed body and on the spot of pavement where the trickle of blood had become a puddle.
Burying his face in his hands, Hal subsided once again next to his wife’s body. The ambulance and fire trucks might be coming, but he knew that whatever aid they brought would be too little, too late. Bonnie Genevieve Morgan-Hal’s beloved Bonnie Jean-was dead at the age of fifty-two.
A uniformed police officer burst through the crowd. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “What happened?”
“He killed her,” Hal Morgan murmured brokenly into his cupped hands. “That rotten, drunken son of a bitch murdered her.”
“Are you okay?” the cop asked. “Were you hit too?” “I’m fine,” Hal insisted. “He hit her, not me.”
Reassured, the cop turned away and fixed his attention on Bonnie. As he did so, Hal tried to rise to his feet, but there was something holding him down, some unfamiliar weight on his shoulder that made it almost impossible to stand. Grunting with effort, he managed to struggle himself upright. Only then did he realize that the extra weight came from a hand gripping his shoulder-a hand that belonged to the kid with the torn jeans and dreadlocks. Tears streamed down the young man’s face. He seemed incapable of letting Hal go.
“I’m sorry about your wife, man,” he managed to say. “I’m really sorry.”
Hal nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “‘Thanks for everything.” When he said thanks, he meant it, because he knew in his soul that had it not been for the restraining weight of that powerful grip, Hal Morgan, too, might have killed someone that night. If the kid hadn’t held him back when Hal started for the truck, the son of a bitch of a driver would have been dead, too. Right then and there. Of injuries inflicted after the incident itself.
Feeling suddenly weak and shaky, Hal limped back over to the edge of the street and sank down on the cold concrete curb. He sat there quietly, knowing all too well what would come next. There would be a world of inquiry-of investigators and paperwork, of questions and answers. In the long run, none of it would make a single whit of difference. What-ever the cops decided in determining how to fix the blame, it wouldn’t bring Bonnie back. She was dead. Gone forever. Nothing any well-meaning cop could do would restore her to him.
As Hal sat there with unnoticed tears streaming down his face, an uncontrollable tremor assailed his whole body. Another concerned police officer hurried over to him. Kneeling beside him, the cop shone a flashlight into Hal Morgan’s eyes.
“How did it happen?” the officer asked.
“The guy creamed us,” Hal answered through chattering teeth. “The bastard in the pickup was driving the wrong way up Third. He came screaming around the corner on two wheels and smashed into us right in the middle of the cross-walk.”
“Officer Stephens told me you weren’t hurt, but are you sure you’re okay?”
Hal Morgan shook his head. Already the finality of it was soaking in. “No,” he groaned. “I’m not okay. Bonnie’s dead. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”
ONE
“Mom,” Jenny Brady shouted, pounding on the bath-room door. “Come quick.”
Joanna Brady, half-dressed in her slip, bra, and panty hose, stood in front of the steamy bathroom mirror. A mascara brush was poised in her hand. Jenny’s frantic pounding startled her enough that she left a smudge of mascara under her green eyes as she hurried to throw open the door. “What is it?”
“Tigger did it again.”
“Did what?”
“Got into another porcupine. Look,” Jenny said, kneeling next to the panting dog. “He’s got quills all over his face, even in his tongue this time.”
Joanna knelt beside her nine-year-old daughter to examine the injured dog. Tigger’s mixed bloodlines, half golden retriever/half pit bull-had left him looking more comical than fierce. He had the blunt nose and the white eye patch of a pit hall combined with a lush, flowing golden-retriever coal. Now he stood there, patient and dejected, letting Joanna study him. His head resembled a pincushion, only the pins in question were three-to-four inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. Threads of bloody drool dangled from his mouth and dripped onto the tile floor.
“What about Sadie?” Joanna asked, referring to their other dog, a female bluetick hound.
“Sadie’s fine.” Jenny struggled to hold back her tears. “She’s eating and Tigger can’t, so I brought him inside.”
Joanna Brady, sheriff of Cochise County in the far-southeastern corner of the state of Arizona, glanced at her watch and then back into her daughter’s blue eyes. There wasn’t much time. The last thing she needed was some new crisis on the home front as she set off to fight her department’s budget wars. Still, the seriousness of the quills embedded in Tigger’s nose precluded any delay.
“That was good thinking,” Joanna said, touching Jenny’s shoulder and trying to reassure her troubled child that she had done the right thing. “If we hurry, I’ll have time to drop him off at Doc Buckwalter’s on my way to the board of supervisors meeting. Do you think you can load him into the Blazer while I finish getting dressed?”
Jenny nodded wordlessly and started toward the kitchen, with the dog trailing obediently at her heels. “And, Jenny?”
Jenny stopped and turned back to her mother. The tears were flowing now, sliding down her cheeks, dripping onto her blouse. It wounded Joanna, made her heart hurt, that Jenny had tried so hard to keep her tears from showing.
“What?” Jenny asked.
“Make a bed for him in the backseat with some of those old clean blankets from the laundry room,” Joanna cautioned. “Otherwise he’s likely to drip all over the carpet.”
Nodding again, Jenny set off.
The new Blazer Joanna drove was, after all, a county-owned vehicle. She wasn’t eager to explain to the guys in Motor Pool how bloodstains found in the back of her vehicle came from a dog so terminally dumb as to go after a porcupine-most likely the same one-for the third time in as many months.
Back in the bathroom, Joanna repaired the mascara dam-age and ran a brush through her red hair. It was getting too long, she noticed. She’d have to have it cut soon, although she had delayed going back to the beauty shop because she was still irked about Jenny’s awful and unauthorized permanent.
While Joanna had been off in Phoenix attending a police officer training school, her mother, Eleanor Lathrop, had engineered a trip to Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty for her granddaughter as a “surprise” for Joanna-with disastrous results. Jenny’s fine blond hair had been chemically fried to a crisp in the process. Two months later, she still looked as though she had put her finger in an electrical socket. And although Joanna held her mother primarily responsible, she was still peeved at Helen Barco, the beautician, as well.
Hurrying into the bedroom, Joanna grabbed clothes from the closet. Since most of the day would be taken up with meetings with the Cochise County Board of Supervisors, she was tempted to leave her body armor at home. Supervisor meetings were held in an overheated conference room, and the soft body armor always made the heat that much worse. But Joanna was a sheriff who was determined to lead by ex-ample. Since she was trying to convince her officers of the advisability of wearing bullet-resistant vests whenever they were on duty, she put hers on as well. Besides, considering the fact that the new sheriff’s honeymoon period with the board was already over, maybe wearing body armor to the meeting wasn’t all that bad an idea.